A Dry Spell Page 11

‘I am, I am,’ he said, flustered. ‘It’s just that there was this thing on about schools’ – he pointed at the television – ‘and I got distracted.’

  ‘Who can I talk to about things, if not you?’ she said miserably.

  ‘You can talk to me.’ He hit the off switch and there was a pop as the screen went blank. Now he would never know whether or not grape skins offered any protection against cancer. ‘Talk away,’ he said, in what he fancied to be a tone likely to encourage confidences.

  The phone rang. ‘That’ll be your mother,’ said Jane, as she always did, with only about fifty per cent accuracy.

  ‘That is the most futile comment I’ve ever heard,’ said Guy, standing up. ‘The fact is, we don’t know who it is until we answer it.’

  ‘No, no, I’ll get it,’ said Jane, who was nearer the door. Guy heard her pick up the receiver in the kitchen and say ‘Yes?’ in a brusque voice which gave way to something softer and more polite, indicating to Guy that it was not a close friend. ‘Oh really? . . . Yes, he has mentioned you actually . . . I’ll just get him.’

  She came back into the room with the self-satisfied expression of someone with news to relate.

  ‘Well, who is it?’ said Guy.

  ‘The infamous Hugo Etchells,’ Jane replied. ‘He’s coming home.’

  11

  When Jane was fifteen a French student called Séverine arrived at her school on a year’s secondment from university in Lille, to hold conversation classes. She had long, black, corkscrew curls, tied back with a scrap of lace, wore a leather jacket and tasselled skirts and smelled of tobacco and incense and perfume unavailable in Worthing. In the summer she exposed, without embarrassment, legs and armpits untouched by a razor. Occasionally her long-haired boyfriend would come over to visit for the weekend and whisk her away from the school gates on his motorbike in a cloud of exhaust and cigarette smoke. She brought copies of Paris Match for the girls to read and discuss – a tantalizing combination of gruesome photographs and impenetrable French journalese. Celebrity gossip rubbed shoulders with close-ups of victims of gangland executions and fatal car crashes; the lessons were never dull.

  Séverine seemed to take a liking to Jane, and often lent her additional reading matter – Les Fleurs du Mal, or Thérèse Desqueyroux – with which Jane struggled, dictionary in hand. Jane reciprocated this attention by trying to imitate Séverine’s loopy, continental handwriting, and wearing knee-length whiskery sweaters, and smudged black eyeliner, and smoking out of her bedroom window. This last pursuit was curtailed when her mother leaned out of the window one day to shake out a duster and saw that the guttering was full of butts. Until this point Jane had wasted much of her precious youth trying to comb, blow-dry and iron her Pre-Raphaelite curls straight. Now she let them dry naturally into ringlets and tied them back, like Séverine, into a loose, low ponytail. (As soon as she had children, of course, all the curl would fall out and she would spend even more time and money trying to restore it.)

  One afternoon the subject under discussion was marriage: pour ou contre. The consensus seemed to be that it was an outmoded convention designed to protect male interests and had no relevance in modern society. The debate had more or less ground to a halt when Jane, who often found herself in these lessons venturing opinions that weren’t really hers, but were dictated by the vocabulary at her disposal, said, ‘I’m going to marry for money.’ It was just a silence-filler, quite untrue to Jane’s character: at fifteen she had no great interest in either money or marriage. Séverine turned on her, fixing her with smoky eyes, and pointing a blunt fingernail, and like a gypsy laying a curse, said, ‘No. You will marry a poor man for love. And you will struggle.’

  Of course the few men Jane went out with and thought herself in love with at university in Canterbury were poor: students were always broke – it went without saying. They wore horrible coats from Oxfam, and lived on beer and kebabs and shivered in unheated rooms, and worked all summer just to get their bank balance back up to zero again.

  Then, when Jane started work as an administrative officer for the NHS, in a community unit back in Sussex, most of the other staff had been women, and she would have been happy to set eyes on an eligible man between Monday and Friday, rich or poor. She was living in a house in Brighton at this time, with an old friend she had known since nursery school – Suzanne – who commuted to a job at a London advertising agency. Having grown up in the area, their circle of friends was quite large, and weekends would be spent shuttling between wine bars, restaurants, and dinner parties. Suzanne was usually in the process of falling in or out of love with some man or other, apparently favouring relationships of violent intensity but brief duration, and Jane was often called upon to provide emotional support, or diversionary entertainment during these many crises. Even as a child Suzanne had preferred quantity to quality, Jane remembered; she had had six imaginary friends to Jane’s one.

  It was in the aftermath of one of these parties – held to give Suzanne an excuse to invite her latest quarry, a minor aristocrat who had just lost his fortune in a casino – that Jane met Guy. It wasn’t love at first sight, exactly, but he certainly made an impression: it wasn’t every day Jane found a naked man leaping around in the kitchen. He had come along as a friend of a friend of one of Suzanne’s cast-offs, but he had arrived late when the flat was already heaving, and Jane hadn’t come into his orbit. If he hadn’t got drunk and missed the last train and dossed down on Suzanne’s floor under a pile of coats they might never have met at all.

  Although Jane was used to Suzanne’s habits by now, she was nevertheless taken aback when she came downstairs the next morning to find a strange man in the kitchen, wearing her own tartan dressing gown and trying to light the electric hob with a match. He was tall – at least six foot, and built like a rugby player. His dark hair was short and sleek at the back, like moles’ fur, longer and scruffier on top.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, looking up. He was hungover and unshaven, but good-looking in an accidental sort of way. Jane wondered how she had failed to notice him the night before. ‘I’m trying to make bacon and eggs, but I can’t get the cooker to light. There’s obviously a knack to it.’ He struck a second match towards himself and the burning head flew off and buried itself in the tartan fleece which began to smoulder. He tried to brush it off but it was already melting through the material. He gave a cry of pain as it reached bare skin, tore off the dressing gown, and jumped up and down on it, gooseflesh naked in the grey kitchen, while Jane stood looking on, laughing in astonishment.

  ‘That’s my dressing gown you’re . . . not wearing,’ she pointed out at last, handing him a PVC apron which was hanging on the back of the door. He tied it round his waist, though it was a little late for modesty by this time and in any case the backless red PVC looked even kinkier. He picked up the matches. ‘Little Devils?’ he said, reading the name on the box. ‘Little bastards, more like.’

  ‘May I?’ Jane reached past him and flicked a switch and the electric ring began to glow orange.

  ‘Ah.’ He looked sheepish, and then, remembering his manners, held out his right hand. ‘I’m Guy, by the way.’

  ‘Jane,’ said Jane, and they shook hands. ‘You wouldn’t be the gambling aristocrat?’ she asked, feeling sure he wasn’t.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Guy. ‘Do I look like one?’

  ‘No,’ said Jane, taking in his bizarre state of undress. ‘You look like a right idiot.’ And they grinned at each other, and at the absurdity of their starting to fall in love like this, in a kitchen, surrounded by empty bottles and full ashtrays and the detritus of a party at which they hadn’t even met.

  After breakfast they cleared up the house and went for a walk along Brighton beach. They threw stones into the freezing February surf and ate chips on the pier and Guy wasted a pocketful of change in the amusement arcade, just to prove that he could gamble with the best of them, if required. The cold wind blew away Guy’s hangover and whipped the party smoke from J
ane’s hair and they came back with raw red faces and earache, but tingling in every fibre. In the evening they tried to make some mulled wine without a recipe, but it was peppery and disgusting, and the more sugar and lemon peel and cinnamon they threw in the worse it tasted, and the funnier they found it. Suzanne came in and asked Guy to help shift a chest of drawers in her room, as she’d lost an earring behind it. While he was upstairs Jane put the sitting room clock back by half an hour so that he would miss his train again. And this time there was no question of him sleeping under coats on Suzanne’s floor.

  12

  Tap tap tap, went the new boy’s shoes along the corridor. His grandmother had hammered in the metal heel reinforcers the night before, as soon as she’d finished sewing Cash’s name-tapes into his uniform.

  The tapping stopped outside the classroom and Guy looked up from the page of Ecce Romani! to see the door open and the housemaster usher in a short, plump boy with red cheeks and spectacles thick as paperweights.

  Mr Granger, the Latin master, paused in the act of writing out a grid of noun endings on the blackboard, and said, half turning, but still keeping the chalk in contact with the board, ‘This must be Etchells. Salve Etchelle.’ He pointed at the empty desk next to Guy. ‘Sede prope Bromelovium.’ The housemaster withdrew, his mission accomplished. There were some sniggers as Etchells looked blank and didn’t move, the red of his cheeks deepening a shade. ‘Translation: sit next to Bromelow.’ This was greeted with more sycophantic laughter.

  Guy, remembering his own first week and the humiliation of having no plimsolls for gym, gave the newcomer an encouraging smile and nodded towards the seat beside him. He was already starting to feel sorry for the poor thing, imagining the torments that were sure to follow. Short, fat, half-blind, and saddled with the name Eggshells. Indeed he did rather resemble Humpty Dumpty as he tapped his way across the classroom towards Guy and squeezed into the vacant seat. The illustration in Guy’s hardback Mother Goose, now suddenly recalled, showed Humpty Dumpty lying at the bottom of a wall in pieces, the fragment containing his face frozen in an expression of shock. When his mother had explained it was just an egg, Guy, aged four, had said, ‘Why did someone think horses would be able to mend it?’

  The Latin master, leading a chant of ‘puella, puellam, puellae, puellae, puella’, took a pale green exercise book from his drawer and slapped it on the new boy’s desk. On the front were four ruled lines in a box. ‘Name, form, house, subject,’ he said, breaking into the middle of his chant without any variation in tone.

  Guy watched the boy produce an ancient, chubby fountain pen – just like the one Guy’s father used for what he called his ‘paperwork’ – from his blazer pocket, and shake it violently before filling in the box in writing so minute as to be barely legible:

  Hugo Blanchard Etchells

  1G

  Cranmer

  Latin

  The houses were all named after famous martyrs. The school motto, embroidered on the blazer badge, was Ad astra per aspera: ‘through strife to the stars’.

  Mr Granger gestured to Guy to wait behind at the end of the lesson. ‘Keep an eye on Etchells, will you?’ he said, gathering up a pile of books and stowing them in a scuffed briefcase. ‘Show him the ropes.’

  Guy had an image of the thick white ropes hanging from the wallbars in the gym where Miles Henderson had been made to stand on a stool with his head in a noose. He knew why he had been chosen to watch over Etchells-not-Eggshells. Because he was the tallest in the class, and popular too: not someone who was picked on. ‘He might be feeling a bit lost. His mother’s just died, poor fellow. That’s just between ourselves.’ He snapped the jaws of the briefcase together and a little puff of chalk dust escaped. ‘Good lad.’

  And while I’m standing here listening to you, They’ve probably got him already, Guy thought. There was no sign of him in the common room or the playground. Guy finally tracked him down at the furthermost corner of the field where he was beheading mushrooms with a stick.

  ‘We’re not supposed to come right to the fence,’ said Guy, as kindly as possible.

  ‘Why not?’ said Etchells, pausing momentarily before resuming his attack on the mushrooms. ‘What’s the point of putting the fence there then?’ He had a strange accent which Guy didn’t recognize.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the rules.’

  Etchells looked disgusted. ‘What a stupid place this is.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Guy, non-committally.

  ‘I was supposed to be going to Winchester, but my father lost a packet last year so I’ve got to come to this dump instead.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ asked Guy. ‘You don’t sound English.’

  ‘South Africa. My father’s got a farm out there. But my grandparents are in Cheltenham. And my mother now.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Guy, confused. Perhaps Mr Granger had misinformed him.

  ‘She’s buried there, I mean,’ Etchells went on. ‘But she always wanted me to go to school in England. And I’d rather be where she is, dead, than where my father is alive, if you see what I mean.’ He gave a short bark of laughter, which confirmed Guy’s suspicion that he wasn’t joking.

  ‘What did she die of?’ asked Guy, who was interested in other people’s tragedies.

  ‘A car crash.’ Etchells felt in his inside blazer pocket and produced a small colour photograph which he handed carefully to Guy. It showed a dark-haired woman in a pink suit and sunglasses. She was sitting on a five-bar gate and smiling at the camera. Guy nodded sympathetically and handed it back. Across the grass he could see some of his friends kicking a ball around, and wished he was with them, instead of looking after this sad podge.

  ‘Do you want to play football?’ he asked, thinking even as he said it that he’d be hopeless; they’d have to put him in goal.

  ‘No thanks,’ said Etchells. ‘I hate football. I hate all sport.’

  Ungrateful too, thought Guy. ‘Fair enough,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to stay and talk to me just because you’ve been told to,’ said Etchells, poking the earth with a twig. ‘I don’t mind being on my own. I’m used to it.’ He looked up at Guy through his thick spectacles. They were so powerful that his face behind them was reduced to a fraction of its width, as though someone had taken a bite out of each temple.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Guy, embarrassed. In the distance a bell rang for end of break and they joined the general drift back towards the building. They would be the last to cross the playground, and very probably late for the next lesson. As they came closer Guy could see one of Them, the worst one, Michaelson, standing just inside the doorway, watching their approach.

  ‘Not that way,’ said Guy, pulling Etchells’s sleeve and tacking off towards the library.

  ‘Why? We need to go in there,’ Etchells protested.

  ‘Michaelson’s there,’ Guy whispered, with his head down. ‘Don’t look!’ he hissed, as Etchells stared at the figure in the shadows. ‘It’s best not to walk past him.’

  ‘Not walk past him? Why the hell not?’ demanded Etchells, his cheeks reddening with indignation.

  ‘It’s best to keep out of his way. He’ll only start taking it out on you,’ Guy advised, but Etchells was already striding towards the door on his short, fat legs, his metal heels ringing on the concrete.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Michaelson, who had moved to block his way in. Michaelson didn’t move. ‘I said “excuse me”,’ Etchells repeated a little louder. Guy tacked off round the other side of the library, muttering to himself, ‘Stupid idiot. Serves him bloody well right.’ As he reached the cloisters he heard Etchells roar ‘EXCUSE ME!’ in a voice that was audible all over the school. Guy sprinted round the back way in time to see several classroom doors open and alarmed teachers emerging. Michaelson was forced to retreat and Etchells, flustered but victorious, stepped over the threshold.

  Guy was simultaneously elated and dismayed. The trouncing of Michaelson was something he would have
given a lot to witness, but poor old Etchells was now done for. It would take all Guy’s vigilance to keep him from some terrible retribution. Guy wasn’t sure he was up to it: he had devoted much energy to the art of avoiding intimidation, and now here he was attached to someone bent on making himself conspicuous.

  It didn’t take Them long to catch up with Etchells. Guy had tried his best, but he couldn’t shadow him every minute of the day, and the moron hadn’t a clue when it came to self-preservation. If someone had left a blazer or bag on a bench where he wanted to sit down, well, Etchells would just dump it on the floor and sit down. If he knew all the answers in class, which he generally did, his hand would be the first up, whoosh, every time. And when one of the masters said, ‘Right, if no one owns up, the whole class will be on litter duty,’ Etchells would grass immediately. ‘It was Otterwell, sir.’ Really, he had no idea.

  A week or so after this incident Guy had to spend his morning break in the chemistry lab, sweeping up the broken glass from a rack of test-tubes he had accidentally knocked off one of the benches on his way out. The science teacher had hauled him back by the collar of his blazer and handed him a broom before he had a chance to apprehend Etchells and tell him to wait. By the time the job was done the bell was already ringing to signal the start of the next lesson, but Etchells failed to show up, and the desk beside Guy remained ominously unoccupied.

  Guy’s sense of unease turned to anxiety when there was no sign of Etchells at lunch: he liked his food and would not willingly have missed a meal. Guy bolted his plate of ox-heart and cabbage, nearly gagging on the string that held the shrunken parcel together, and then, forgetting he had rugby practice, set off to find him. A tour of the obvious places – the sick bay, the field, the cadets’ hut, the back of the cricket pavilion, the wheelie bins where they had found that poor bastard, whatshisname, sitting amongst the garbage – all yielded nothing. Finally, as a last resort, Guy tried the toilets, though he had instructed Etchells never, ever, to go in there alone at break time. He pushed open the door and a gust from the open windows caught it and flung it hard back against the side of the urinals with a crash. There didn’t seem to be anyone about, but one of the doors was closed.